You would’ve undoubtedly heard or read about the million or so apps that allow you to control iTunes from the Mac Menu Bar, and the hundreds of apps that exist for services like Pandora and Spotify. Grooveshark Control Center is a free Mac app that lets you control Grooveshark from the Menu Bar. The app is meant to let you control the online music service if Chrome is your default browser, and you use Growl. Seeing as how Chrome just surpassed Internet Explorer to become the No.1 browser worldwide, it might just be an excellent time to install this app if you regularly use Grooveshark. The app negates the need to have a similar extension installed in your browser, and makes more sense, since Chrome isn’t the only application you use when working.

Grooveshark Control Center adds a button with the Grooveshark logo to you system’s Menu Bar. Click it to view the shortcut keys for playing/pausing a song or moving to the next or previous one. If you don’t want to use the keyboard shortcuts (and you might not, since they are rather complicated and there is no way to modify them), you can always use the app’s menu.

The app uses Growl to notify you when you a new song is played. The notification doesn’t appear when you switch to a different song, but rather, when the song starts playing. If you’re on a slow connection, the notification might not appear for a while, but on speedier connections, the notification pops up almost instantly.

Grooveshark Control Center also lets you blacklist artists that you don’t like and you can later manage them. As per our tests, the app did blacklist artists, but they didn’t show up in the window that opens when Manage blacklist is clicked. This implies that you can add artists, but you won’t be able to remove them. This is a problem if you accidentally blacklist an artist you like.

The developers of Grooveshark Control Center cite it as an alternative to Musicality, and claim that it uses 6 times fewer resources than the former. The app is still new, only version 1.0, so you can expect a few bugs that need ironing out. The concept is, nevertheless, good, since Grooveshark is a famous service, and the Control Center happens to be free.